T
he Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) hosts the largest United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission in the world—the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO.) The mission currently has 18,399 personnel,
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and costs the international community USD$1,086,018,600 per year. UN peacekeeping troops have been in the eastern DRC since 1999. Paradoxically, since their arrival, conflicts in the eastern DRC, currently involving more than 100 armed groups,
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have intensified and become more complicated. MONUSCO’s mission has changed over the years. Initially seen as an interim measure to help the DRC build a new army, the UN later increased MONUSCO’s size, then broadened its powers, and finally extended its mandate to protecting civilians. Despite these adjustments, peace has been elusive in the DRC. 2019 and the beginning of 2020 witnessed a reigniting of conflict in the eastern DRC, with a significant number of victims.
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This situation has led stakeholders to ask: “Why the many years of failure? Is there a ‘missing link?’” This paper aims to respond to these two questions.
Building Peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Beyond the United Nations Toolkit
By Rigobert Minani Bihuzo, S.J., Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding Scholar July 2020
The Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding (SVNP)
is a continent-wide network of African policy, research and academic organizations that works with the Wilson Center’s Africa Program to bring African knowledge and perspectives to U.S., African, and international policy on peacebuilding in Africa. Established in 2011 and supported by the generous financial support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the project provides avenues for African researchers and practitioners to engage with, inform, and exchange analyses and perspectives with U.S., African, and international policymakers in order to develop the most appropriate, cohesive, and inclusive policy frameworks and approaches to achieving sustainable peace in Africa. This publication was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed in this paper are solely the responsibility of the author and do not represent the views of the Wilson Center or the Carnegie Corporation of New York.For more information please visit https://www.wilsoncenter.org/the-southern-voices-network-for-peacebuilding
The Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding
Research Paper No. 26
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Wilson Center - Africa Program
A Brief History of Armed Conflict and Attempted Peacebuilding in the Eastern DRC
It is widely understood that the DRC experienced a two-phased rebellion between 1996 and 2003. The first phase, which began in September 1996 and ended in May 1997, was described as a “war of liberation” by its initiators. This war ended the Mobutu dictatorship, which had lasted 32 years, and saw Laurent Désiré Kabila take over as president. The second phase started in August 1998 and ended in April 2003 with the signing of the Comprehensive and Inclusive Agreement on Inter-Congolese Dialogue and the establishment of institutions to lead the country’s political transition. Both phases of the rebellion have been well researched and assessed by multiple studies.
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The period after the 2003 agreement has been characterized by persistent violence across the eastern DRC, especially in the fragile Kivu region. The most culpable armed groups in the violence include the National Congress for Development (CNDP, 2003-2009); the March 23 Movement (M23, 2012-2013); the Forces of Defense and Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR, 1996-present); and, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF, 1996-present). Hundreds
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of local militias known as “Mayi-Mayi” were also dragged into the conflict. These post-2003 conflicts deeply undermined the exercise of central power from the capital, Kinshasa. The DRC’s national army (FARDC) has continually had to confront various forces, including the regular armies of Rwanda and Uganda alongside proxy rebel groups
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they sponsor, external armed groups,
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and the numerous Mayi-Mayi militias. To put an end to these conflicts, the Congolese government and the United Nations, with massive support from the international community, undertook several peace initiatives, some of which are ongoing.
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The first was the International Conference for Peace and Security in the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR). Its major early achievement was the Dar-es-Salam Declaration that was signed and adopted in June 2004 by the region’s heads of state during a troubled period marked by the beginning of the CNDP rebellion. Signatories to the declaration pledged to:
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Fully support the national peace processes in the region and refrain from any acts (…) to negatively impact them (…) Strengthen bilateral and regional cooperation, through the adoption and effective implementation of Non-Aggression and Common Defense Pacts; Establish an effective regional security framework for the prevention, management and peaceful settlement of conflicts (…) Fight genocide in the Great Lakes region and hereby undertake to neutralize, disarm, arrest and transfer to relevant international tribunals the perpetrators of genocide, including the forces that committed genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and any such other forces that may occur in future (…) Strengthen cooperation in the area of defense and security and promote confidence building by establishing policies, measures and mechanisms aimed at enhancing good neighborliness and multi-sectoral cooperation (…)”
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When the ICGLR process began to falter because of a new wave of CNDP operations, the DRC government convened a second peace initiative, the Goma Conference in 2008. This was an important and innovative initiative that included broad representation of local communities.
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The Goma Conference launched two years of negotiations (2008-10) between the government and the CNDP. However, like the earlier ICGLR process, the Goma process was also unable to definitively end the conflict.
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Wilson Center - Africa Program
A third peace initiative centered on the
San Egidio
meeting in Rome (2005) and the “
Tripartite–Plus-One
” mechanism convened by the U.S. government in Nairobi (2007). These efforts attempted to find a solution to the presence in the eastern DRC of an ex-Rwandan army group, the FAR,
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who had fled into Congo after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
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A fourth peace initiative emerged in 2012 after the CNDP revived itself under the name of the March 23 Movement (M23). Both the Kampala Negotiations (2012-2013) and the Addis Ababa Framework Agreement (February 2013) focused on addressing the M23 rebellion. However, the Kampala Negotiations were terminated after the FARDC and MONUSCO military victory over the M23 rebels, although neither the victory nor the talks brought an end to violent conflict in the eastern DRC. The failure of these multiple peace processes, the high number of war victims, and the eastern DRC’s chronic humanitarian crisis raise the question of why the efforts of the DRC government, the UN, and other actors over the last 20 years have failed to yield peace in this volatile region.
An Assessment of Peacebuilding Failures in the Eastern DRC
There are several plausible explanations as to why the UN has struggled to bring about peace in the DRC despite its huge effort and apparent goodwill. One is that the peace efforts it led or backed all appeared to be built on a poor understanding of the dynamics of the militias and armed groups that have tormented the eastern DRC for over two decades. A closely related explanation is the failure of the various peace efforts to effectively consult, much less involve, local communities and leaders. In addition, many of the peace agreements failed to impose enforceable obligations on the signatories. Another consequential flaw in the UN approach was that even interventions that worked initially experienced difficulties in adapting when conditions shifted—as they so often did. Perhaps the most crucial flaw in the various UN-sponsored peace efforts in the eastern DRC was the fact that the peace processes were consistently based on faulty and biased diagnoses of the root causes of the region’s conflict. Beginning with the 1999 Lusaka Agreement that called for a UN peacekeeping mission and continuing through to the 2013 Addis Ababa Framework Agreement, the list of failed peace agreements in the eastern DRC is long.
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The repeated failures demand an examination of the analyses that undergirded the peace efforts. In the eyes of many UN officials and Western experts, the roots of the conflict are primarily internal to the DRC: a weak state, deficient democracy, underdeveloped security apparatus, tense ethnic relations, rampant smuggling of natural resources, and destabilizing domestic political machinations. However, this analysis, although accurate in some aspects, is flawed. Namely, it overlooks and avoids naming the “pyromaniacs”—the key actors responsible for starting and perpetuating conflict in the eastern DRC. In other words, this flawed analysis fails to hold accountable the initiators of the region’s conflict. Along with this, it turns a blind eye toward clear criminal behavior
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and other findings documented in reports by the UN Group of Experts on the DRC.
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One former Group of Experts member testified to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2012 that:
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Rwandan involvement (…) becomes more comprehensible when understood as a determined and calculated drive to spawn the creation of an autonomous federal state for the eastern Congo (…) One of the most senior intelligence officers within the Rwandan government (…) reflecting the thinking of many of his colleagues, asserted (…) Goma should relate to Kinshasa in the same way